[Talk-us] Admin boundaries tied to roads

[Anthony]

On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 10:24 PM, Alan Mintz
<Alan_Mintz+OSM at earthlink.net<Alan_Mintz%2BOSM at earthlink.net>
> wrote:

> "map what's on the ground" is the wrong thing to do so often that I don't
> really understand why it was decided upon, nor why people continue hold it
> up on a pedestal, despite continuing problems with it.
>

It's the OSM equivalent of Wikipedia's "no original research" policy.  It
often gets in the way, and sometimes just has to be ignored, but for a
massively collaborative project like OSM it's hard to see how you can do
without it.

On Thu, Apr 22, 2010 at 12:41 PM, Apollinaris Schoell <aschoell at gmail.com>wrote:

> there is a reason for "map what is on the ground" this is the only thing we
> can verify.
>

The term "map what's on the ground" is almost always used in a way which is
more restrictive than "map what can be verified".  There are plenty of
things which can be verified by looking through the legal code or official
records, but don't constitute "what's on the ground".

The main problem with allowing people to input such information is that it's
easily misinterpreted by the average OSM contributor.  This is why I see it
as analogous to Wikipedia's "no original research".  In a perfect world, we
wouldn't need it.  But in a real world massively collaborative project,
unless you're going to have some sort of hierarchy or voting system or
something, it often proves to be necessary.

A navi system is more useful if the instructions and signs match.
>

Depends on your purpose.  If you're trying to navigate to the missigned
street (e.g. "California Street", where the sign reads "Carolina Street"),
you don't want to get a response of "street not found".  For most other
purposes you'd rather have the incorrect name (at least until it gets
fixed).
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